





s 



\ 







THE OLD AND THE NhW CENTURY. 



An Address 

DELIVERED BEFORE THE 

New York Historical Society 



*77 



NINETY-SIXTH ANNIVERSARY, 



Tuesday, November 20, 1900, 



The Rev. MARVIN R. VINCENT, D.D. 




NEW YORK: 
PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY. 

1900. 



. fat 



Officers of the Society, 1900. 



PRESIDENT, 

*JOHN ALSOP KING. 

FIRST VICE-PRESIDENT, 

J . PIERPONT MO RG A N . 

SECOND VICE-PRESIDENT, 

JOHN S. KENNEDY. 

FOREIGN CORRESPONDING SECRETARY, 

REV. EUGENE A . HOFFMAN, D.I) 

DOMESTIC CORRESPONDING SECRETARY, 

NICHOLAS FISH. 

RECORDING SECRETARY, 

SYDNEY H. CARNEY, Jr., M.D. 

ACTING TREASURER, 

JOHN J. TUCKER. 

LIBRARIAN, 

ROBERT H. KELBY. 
* Died November 21, 1900. 



EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE. 



FIRST CLASS — FOR ONE YEAR, ENDING I90I. 

JOHN A. WEEKES, J. PIERPONT MORGAN 

JOHN J. TUCKER. 

SECOND CLASS FOR TWO YEARS, ENDING 1902. 

F. ROBERT SCHELL. DANIEL PARISH, Jr.. 

FREDERIC WENDELL JACKSON. , 

THIRD CLASS FOR THREE YEARS, ENDING I903. 

NICHOLAS FISH, ISAAC J. GREENWOOD, 

FRANCIS H. MARKOE, M.D. 

FOURTH CLASS FOR FOUR YEARS, ENDING I9O4. 

JOHN S. KENNEDY, GEORGE W. VANDERBILT, 

CHARLES ISHAM. 

JOHN J. TUCKER, Chairman, 
DANIEL PARISH, Jr., Secretary. 

[The President, Recording Secretary, Treasurer, and Librarian 
are members, ex-officio, of the Executive Committee.] 



At a meeting of the New York Historical Society, held 
in its Hall, on Tuesday evening, November 20, 1900, to cel- 
ebrate the Ninety-sixth Anniversary of the Founding of the 
Society : 

The Anniversary Address was delivered by the Reverend 
Marvin R. Vincent, D.D., on "The Old and the New 
Century." 

On its conclusion, Mr. A. V. W. Van Vechten, with 
remarks, submitted the following resolution which was 
adopted unanimously : 

Resolved, That the thanks of the Society be presented to 
the Reverend Marvin R. Vincent, D.D., for the learned, 
eloquent, and instructive address delivered before the So- 
ciety this evening, and that a copy be requested for pub- 
lication. 

Extract from the minutes. 

Sydney H. Carney, Jr., 

Recording Secretary. 



THE OLD AND THE NEW CENTURY 



I must claim your indulgent sympathy this 
evening. In these days there is a general pro- 
test against too little liberty : my embarrassment 
comes of having too much. I am like the old 
Roman, standing at the golden milestone in the 
Forum, with the roads striking out in all direc- 
tions, for Brundisium, Ancona, Cisalpine Gaul, 
Macedonia, and Byzantium, and doubtful which to 
take. The officers of your society, in their invita- 
tion to me, have prescribed no theme and have 
imposed no limitations. I am simply turned loose 
upon the outbranching highways of a century of 
history — a century more pregnant with great 
movements, great achievements, and great ideas 
than any that has preceded it, and the world is all 
before me where to choose. There lie ready to 
my hand the history of this Society, the history of 
our City, the history of our State, the history of 
the United States, and the history of the world ; 
and what complicates the matter is, that a speaker 
can hardly deal with any one of these without step- 
ping upon the lines of the others. I am reminded 
of Charles Lamb's remark on the occasion of his 
emancipation from the India House: "It was like 



8 The Old and the New Century. 

passing out of time into eternity ; for it is a sort of 
eternity for a man to have his time all to himself." 

Let me take up the first thing which lies directly 
in my path ; the pleasant duty of congratulating 
the officers and members of this venerable and 
justly honoured society on the completion of nearly 
a century of life and fruitful work. It would be 
superfluous to dilate upon your services to this city 
and to the nation at large. It may or may not be 
much for a man or an institution to have lived for 
ninety-six years. Age, in itself, is not necessarily 
respectable. It does not follow that the signifi- 
cance of years imparts itself to those who have 
lived in them. It is quite possible that they may 
have let the years run past them like a panorama, 
or over them, like a running stream over stones, 
with no result but to wear away the stones. But 
ninety-six years, to an institution which has been 
an integral part of its age, which has addressed 
itself to the solution of its problems, knit itself into 
its relationships, and helped to direct its currents 
of thought and to work out its ideas — have woven 
for that institution a crown of honour. The long 
list of the notable names which figure in your cata- 
logue is a warrant that you have not been idle nor 
insignificant nor useless. You have been distinctly 
a force in the culture ,of this city. You number 
among your names those of men who were active 
in the achievement of our national independence 
and in the framing of our constitution ; and had 



The Old and the New Century. 9 

you accomplished nothing- else, you would be 
entitled to lasting remembrance for a century ot 
protest and effort against that state of things so 
tersely characterised by Thucydides, where he 
says : " So little trouble do men take in the search 
after truth : so readily do they accept what first 
comes to hand." 

Your own archives, so laboriously amassed and 
so carefully classified, offer to a speaker a most se- 
ductive temptation to indulge in gossipy details 
and contrasts, with only a small part of which it 
would be easy to consume the whole evening. 
This temptation I shall resist ; but it will none the 
less be helpful if we orient ourselves by noting a 
few salient facts. 

It is Friday evening, November 20, 1804. Elev- 
en gentlemen assemble in the picture-room ot 
the City Hall in Wall Street, and agree to form 
themselves into a society, the principal design of 
which shall be to collect and preserve whatever 
may relate to the natural, civil, or ecclesiastical 
history of the United States in general, and of this 
State in particular. At an adjourned meeting on 
Monday evening, December 10th, the constitution 
of the New York Historical Society is reported 
and adopted. On January 14, 1805, the first 
meeting is held, and the society is fully organised. 
Thomas Jefferson is President of the United States 
George III. is on the British throne. It is twenty- 
eight years since the Declaration of Independence 



io The Old and the New Century. 

was signed, and five years since the death of 
George Washington. Seventeen States constitute 
the United States of America, the population of 
which is between four and five millions. 

The city of New York has a population of be- 
tween sixty and seventy thousand. The majority 
of the residents live below Cortlandt Street and 
Maiden Lane, and the outside line is a little above 
Worth Street. It wants yet eight years to the 
completion of the present City Hall, the rear of 
which is constructed of brown freestone, under the 
impression that it is to be exposed to the gaze of 
suburbans only. Washington Square is the Pot- 
ter's Field, and Columbia College is on the original 
site of King's College, between what are now 
Church, Murray, and Barclay Streets and College 
Place ; or, as Dr. Francis puts it, " Proud of her 
healthy and beautiful locality, laved, almost up to 
the borders of her foundation, by the flowing 
stream of the Hudson." Old Trinity is repre- 
sented by her second church edifice, erected in 
1778, with its modest spire, its long gothic win- 
dows, and its little domed portico over the main 
entrance. It wants yet twenty-one years to the 
completion of the Erie Canal. There are no pub- 
lic facilities for getting out of town and travelling 
through the country. The adventurous voyager 
must take his life in his hand with his carpet-bag, 
and intrust himself to stage-coaches, saddle- 
horses, and sloops. Of this latter mode of trans- 



The Old and the New Century. 1 1 

portation one may get a fair idea from the lively 
story of "Dolf Heydegger" by Washington Irving, 
who, in 1 80 1, was a youth of seventeen, at 128 
William Street. It will be three years before Ful- 
ton's Clermont will make her first passage up the 
Hudson, causing the countrvman on the Palisades 
to tell his wife that he had seen the Devil on his 
way to Albany in a sawmill. Forty years are yet 
to pass before Morse will give the world the elec- 
tric telegraph ; seven years before Colonel John 
Stevens will start the first steam ferry to Hoboken ; 
twenty-one years before Stephenson's first trial 
with a locomotive, and twenty-four years before the 
first steam railway in America. Napoleon is fast 
climbing to the pinnacle of his greatness, and 
already the elements are fermenting which are to 
evolve the war of 1812. 

The contrast with to-day — there is no time and 
no need for me to elaborate it. The seventeen 
States have become forty-five ; the five millions 
have swelled to over seventy-six millions, and the 
sixty-five thousand of this city to three and a half 
millions. We have more than eight hundred thou- 
sand miles of telegraph ; we go from New York 
to San Francisco in four days. To quote another's 
words: " WiHi the railroads which have been built, 
we could parallel every track in all Europe, and 
then have enough over, if we could use the equa- 
tor for a road-bed, to girdle the earth." The 
progress in invention, education, manufactures, 



12 The Old and the Nezv Century. , 

luxury, art, literature, you must trace for your- 
selves. 

We stand on the borders of the new century 
with a marvellous equipment. May it not be fairly 
assumed that we have, to a great extent, outgrown 
that earlier and crude stage in which we were 
given to boasting of bigness and smartness, to re- 
garding older nations with pity or contempt, and 
our democracy as a completed and successful exper- 
iment ? It seems to me that the conviction has 
more than dawned that our work is only begun, 
and that, while the future may enfold higher devel- 
opment and larger achievement, it also enfolds 
problems, some of which have already given sig- 
nificant hints of themselves, and which, in their 
magnitude, their reach, and the number of new 
factors they involve, will tax to the utmost the 
wisdom of those in whose hands their solution 
shall lie. It seems to me that, at the gate of the 
new century, we can hardly fail to realise that we 
ourselves, in our own rapid and enormous growth, 
have created new necessities which we must meet, 
new questions which we must answer, and new and 
colossal difficulties with which we must grapple. 
It is the best of all auguries for the future if we 
have put away our youthful vanity, and have grown 
humbler. 

The Old and the New Century. — Is it possible 
to characterise each briefly and comprehensively ? 
It is not so easy as is often supposed, to throw 



The Old and the New Century. 13 

history into clearly defined periods and to draw 
sharply the lines of cleavage between them. The 
Oxford historian, the late Edward Freeman, was 
wont to protest vigorously against the popular di- 
vision of history into ancient and modern, and to 
declare that he had never been able to find out the 
difference between the two, nor where ancient his- 
tory ends and modern history begins ; and Thomas 
Arnold was riodit when he claimed that what is 
called ancient history is the most truly modern, the 
most truly living, and the most rich in practical 
lessons for every succeeding age. 

We may indeed throw history roughly into di- 
visions, in each of which some particular idea 
or aggregation of ideas takes definite shape, and is 
worked out wholly or in part, and we may denote 
the century by the idea ; but the fact remains 
that the ideas of successive periods overlap 
in their development, and that those ideas which 
burst into flower in one period, and which we seize 
upon as characteristic, have been fermenting and 
germinating in preceding periods, and put forth 
new branches and yield new fruit in those which 
succeed. It may be correct to say, in a general 
and superficial way, that the protest against relig- 
ious hierarchy and the rise of religious liberty are 
characteristic of the sixteenth century, or that the 
eighteenth century is the century of social and phil- 
osophic liberty and illuminism : but the protest 
aeainst Hildebrandism be^an lon^ before the six- 



14 The Old and the Neiv Century. 

teenth century, and the spirit of Rousseau, Vol- 
taire, and Diderot was astir in Abelard. 

Guarding ourselves at this point, it may suffic- 
iently serve our present purpose to describe the 
old century as a century of demolition and ac- 
quisition, and to say that, with the new century, 
we are entering more definitely upon a period of 
construction. 

As to demolition, we had, in the beginning, for- 
eign tyranny to break down ; we have had slav- 
ery to abolish ; we have had to destroy or sur- 
mount the physical obstacles to free intercourse ; 
we have had to overcome the secrecy and obsti- 
nacy of the rocks, and to make them give up their 
gold and silver ; we have had to overcome ignor- 
ance and the conceited reluctance of a young na- 
tion to learn from older and riper civilisations ; 
we have had to assail, we have not yet demol- 
ished, the barrier of race-prejudice. 

As to acquisition, we have acquired vast wealth, 
and at a phenomenal rate. In the thirty years 
from i860 to 1890, notwithstanding the enormous 
drain created by the civil war, we created and 
accumulated forty-nine thousand millions of dol- 
lars, a thousand millions more than the entire 
wealth of Great Britain, and the increase has been 
at a larger rate since 1890. From a borrowing 
nation we have become a lending nation. In 
1898-99 our exports exceeded our imports by five 
hundred and thirty millions of dollars, and our 



The Old and the Nezv Century. 15 

manufactured products have more than doubled in 
the last six years. We have travelled extensively, 
and have brought back from the old world far 
more than an acquaintance with picture galleries 
and cathedrals. Our eyes have been opened to 
the fact that older civilisations have much to teach 
us in the art and economy of living, and that they 
had made great and serious experiments in gov- 
ernment, had profoundly studied political philoso- 
phy, had elaborated educational systems, had de- 
veloped the science of war and achieved lasting 
triumphs in art and literature, before Columbus 
attempted the Atlantic with his caravels. We 
have acquired the arts of luxury, and a large 
share of education and literary culture. We go 
into the new century with political independence, 
with religious liberty, with a vast system of popu- 
lar education, with an imposing array of churches, 
schools, and charitable institutions ; with a re- 
cognised supremacy in agriculture and in certain 
branches of manufacture ; with a prodigious de- 
velopment of inventive talent ; with an imposing 
array of facilities for travel ; with a vast com- 
mercial system, and with a growing and highly 
scientific apparatus for war. We have silenced 
the sneering question, "Who reads an American 
book?" In medical science, in chemistry and 
physics, in theology and Biblical criticism, the 
works of our specialists challenge the attention of 
European scholars. We have occupied and culti- 



1 6 The Old and the New Century. 

vated a vast area of new territory, and have 
developed immense mining and agricultural re- 
sources, and have acquired important dependen- ■ 
cies in the Pacific and in the Caribbean Sea. 

I repeat, we have been principally occupied dur- 
ing the past century in amassing these things, and 
in breaking down the obstacles to acquisition. 
We have proved our ability to deal with the obsta- 
cles and to reap the fruits of energy, enterprise, 
and inventive skill. But the significant question 
which confronts us at the gate of the new century 
is, " What next ? " What are we going to do with 
it all? What are we going to make out of it? 
How are we going to make it all tributary to the 
evolution of the ideal commonwealth — the consum- 
mate embodiment of the principle of constitutional 
liberty? It is surely neither invidious, pessimistic, 
nor un-American to assume that this consummation 
is yet in the future. You recall, perhaps, the 
words of Mr. Bryce : "I have seen the latest ex- 
periment which mankind have tried, and the last 
which they can ever hope to try under equally 
favouring conditions. A race of unequalled en- 
ergy and unsurpassed variety of gifts, a race apt 
for conquest and for the arts of peace, which has 
covered the world with the triumphs of its sword, 
and planted its laws in a hundred islands of the 
sea, sent the choicest of its children to a new land 
rich with the bounties of nature, bidding them in- 
crease and multiply, with no enemies to fear from 



The Old and the New Century. \J 

Europe, and few of those evils to eradicate which 
Europe inherits from its feudal past. They have 
multiplied until the sapling of two centuries ago 
overtops the parent trunk ; they have drawn from 
their continent a wealth which no one dreamed of; 
they have kept themselves aloof from old-world 
strife, and have no foe in the world to fear ; they 
have destroyed, after a tremendous struggle, the 
one root of evil which the mother-country, in an 
unhappy hour, planted among them ; and yet the 
government and institutions, as well as the indus- 
trial civilisation of America, are far removed from 
that ideal commonwealth which European philoso- 
phers imagined, and Americans expected to cre- 
ate." These are the words of an Englishman, of 
a cool, keen, and judicial observer, and of a hearty 
friend and admirer. We must, of course, discount 
the somewhat rose - coloured description of the 
paternal and benignant attitude of England in 
sending her children forth to these shores, and bid- 
ding them increase and multiply, with no enemies 
to fear from Europe. This last statement is adapt- 
ed to provoke a smile, when it is remembered 
that England herself was our chief European ene- 
my, that we had two wars with her, and that 
she stabbed us in the back in our great civil con- 
flict. But setting this aside, are not the words 
fair, truthful, and discerning ? We have done 
much, but doing and making are not synonymous 
terms. We started upon the experiment of de- 



1 8 The Old and the New Century. 

mocracy under singularly favourable conditions, 
and yet, as has been truthfully said, " the plan of 
throwing the whole responsibility of government 
upon the people themselves was a sublime vent- 
ure of faith on the part of our forefathers." There 
were things which they could not foresee, which 
we have seen and are seeing ; and even as the 
towering, many-tinted iceberg which lifts its huge 
bulk high above the waves, tells the practised eye 
that there is still more of it beneath than above the 
ocean-floor, so the thoughtful observer of our na- 
tional life and history detects in what is already 
apparent, imposing and brilliant though it be, hints 
of larger problems and more vital issues which 
have not yet emerged. Is our experiment a suc- 
cess ? Have we successfully vindicated democracy 
as the ideal polity for the future and for the world ? 
We were not the first to try the democratic experi- 
ment. The success of those who tried it before 
us was not encouraging. There is no historical 
record of any other democracy which lasted for a 
hundred years. I am not a pessimist. I am not 
boding failure or disaster. I am merely suggest- 
ing a question which wiser men than I have asked 
before. I am asking only that we stop and think. 
There are political theorists, as you all know, who 
maintain that democracy is the child of ignorance, 
and must inevitably mean the rule of the worst. 
Have we furnished anything going to confirm that 
conclusion ? Are we able to say to-day, in the 



'The Old and the New Century. 19 

light of more than a century of history, that Amer- 
ican democracy proves that democracy means the 
rule of the best and the most intelligent ? 

This is an immense question, impossible to treat 
satisfactorily within my limits. The most that can 
be done is to select some salient points of our 
political, intellectual, social, and moral development, 
and see what hints they furnish which may pro- 
voke thought, or hope, or apprehension, or caution. 

It should be repeated and emphasised, that the 
answer to such a question must take into account 
many more factors than those which entered into 
De Tocqueville's discussion, some few more per- 
haps than entered into the more recent and very 
remarkable work of Mr. Bryce. It did not prove 
an altogether simple and easy matter to organise 
and compact an infant people of three or four 
millions into a working democracy : what then shall 
be said of a people of over seventy-six millions, dis- 
tributed over an area of three and one-half mill- 
ions of square miles, lying in different climatic 
belts, including an enormous foreign element, edu- 
cated under different political and social conditions 
from our own, freely admitted to a share in 
government, and with a voice in the shaping of 
our institutions ; in a country representing differ- 
ent material interests in its different sections, and 
open to the possibility of sectional prejudice and 
of sectional rivalry? Is the old machinery ade- 
quate to the new and heavier strain? Can the 



20 The Old and the Nezv Century. 

elements over the whole area be made homogene- 
ous, or at least adjusted in a substantial unity? 
How strong a pervasive power resides in the dem- 
ocratic leaven ? How strong- a solvent is it to dis- 
integrate or modify foreign elements ? This is the 
vast constructive problem which is looming up in 
the reddening dawn of the new century — how in- 
dividual liberty, allowed its full legitimate scope, is 
to be run into the mould of a commonwealth in 
which the liberty of the individual and the interest 
of the body politic shall be in perfect equipoise ; in 
which, as De Tocqueville puts it, " All men would 
feel an equal love and respect for the laws of 
which they consider themselves as the authors ; in 
which the authority of the government would be 
respected as necessary, though not as divine ; and 
in which the loyalty of the subject to the chief 
magistrate would not be a passion, but a quiet and 
rational persuasion ; in which, every individual 
being in possession of rights which he is sure to 
retain, a kind of manly courtesy would arise be- 
tween all classes, alike removed from pride and 
servility ; in which the people, well acquainted 
with their own true interests, would understand 
that, in order to profit by the advantages of soci- 
ety, it is necessary to satisfy its requisitions." I 
may add to this, in which religion shall have a 
voice along with political authority, yet neither 
religion nor political authority trench upon the 
other's province ; in which there shall be ren- 



The Old and the New Century. 21 

dered unto Caesar the things which are Csesar's, 
and unto God the things which are God's. 

The factor of this problem which, during the 
past century, has been pushing to the front, the 
factor which includes and covers a multitude of 
smaller factors, is the principle of contact. I use 
the word "principle" advisedly, because, in the 
whole course of the world's history, no principle 
has more persistently and irresistibly asserted 
itself. No nation has been allowed to live an en- 
tirely isolated life, or to develop its own institu- 
tions without reference to the great body of na- 
tions. There is, at first view, a superficial denial 
of this principle in the structure of physical nature, 
in the material separations of mountain and forest 
and ocean, and in the fact of distance. A second 
denial has asserted itself in the radical differences 
of national temperament, habit, and language ; a 
third in certain national conceits deeply rooted in 
religion or culture. The Hebrew fenced himself 
off from the rest of mankind with his religion, the 
central idea of which was, that he was selected 
by God to be separate and alone ; that his God 
was a Jewish God, and that everything that was 
not Jewish was contemptible. The Greek styled 
every one a Barbarian who was not a Greek. 
The Basque, claiming that he spoke the lan- 
o-uacre which Noah received from Adam, with- 
drew to his little nook in the western Pyrenees, 
withstood the successive irruptions of Phoenician, 



22 The Old and the Nezv Century. 

Greek, Egyptian, and Carthaginian, and defied the 
power of the Roman Augustus. Yet the Hebrew- 
race became distributed through the Gentile com- 
munities, and the Hebrew yielded to the seductive 
influence of Greek custom and toned his literature 
and his religion into partial accommodation with 
Gentile society. Despised and ridiculed by Ro- 
man poets and satirists, the Roman Empire could 
not do without him, and conceded to him privi- 
leges which it refused to native Roman citizens. 
Greece could not evade contact with Rome, and 
Rome gave herself up to the influence of Greek 
art and literature. Sicily became the meeting- 
place of the nations, the battle-field of rival races 
and of rival creeds, a point of power for Phoeni- 
cians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, and 
Lombards. The Basque threw himself into the 
Carlist insurrection and was swept, after all his 
years of proud isolation, into the Spanish mon- 
archy, compelled to endure the presence of Span- 
ish garrisons in his towns, and to substitute the 
Spanish language for his own in his schools. 
These are only a few of the illustrations of his- 
tory's emphatic assertion that it is not good for 
nations any more than for men to be alone. His- 
tory is a series of shocks, signalising the rupture 
of natural and artificial barriers between men and 
races. The idea of the race being more than the 
individual, of the individual reaching his real con- 
summation in the race, expands naturally and nee- 



The Old and the New Century. 23 

essarily into the idea of the individual state or race 
realising its true and highest destiny in the com- 
munity of races and states. That idea underlies 
alike the philosophy of history and Christianity 
which is, before all else, a social system. The 
educative power of contact and social attrition is 
no mere matter of theory. It is illustrated and 
enforced, alike in the history of nations and of in- 
dividuals ; of literary culture and of religion. It is 
assumed in the very existence of the science of 
international law. 

We may not always approve or like the proc- 
esses by which barriers are torn away, and peo- 
ples hurled rather than drawn together. Blood 
flows in rivers, and force and fraud assert them- 
selves : none the less the process goes on and 
emphasises the eternal decree — it is not good for 
nations to be alone. England throws herself into 
India, Australia, and Africa; America is pushed, 
in the inevitable process of her own expansion, 
nearer to the frontiers of Mongol civilisation, and 
plants herself in the Pacific Islands and in the 
West Indies. The recent sickening horrors in 
China are on the same line. Whatever Salis- 
bury's diplomacy may mean, whatever the under- 
standing between the Kaiser and the Czar, be 
sure that the jealous, self-centred, isolated China 
of the past centuries is no more forever. The na- 
tions will have a highway through her plains and 
cities ; the throb of the nineteenth century pulse 



24 



The Old and the New Century 



will jar the stagnation of her most interior prov- 
inces, and the hideous brutality of her barbarism 
will be stamped out under the heel of a human- 
ity which is both consciously and unconsciously 
Christian. 

Can we escape being' drawn into the deep and 
strong current of this movement? Can Mont Blanc 
escape the touch of the rising sun ? Not so. It 
enters into our constructive problem. We have 
been in the current, possibly, longer than some of 
us have suspected. Our experience in Hawaii 
and Cuba and the Philippines is by no means our 
initial experience. To escape complication by 
means of a Monroe doctrine, has not been to es- 
cape contact. How we may adjust the possible 
fact of complication depends on our adjustment of 
the actual fact of contact. This fact we have been 
confronting for a good part of the past century in 
the immense immigration into the United States. 
Whatever we may have already accomplished in 
the moulding process, has not been upon a mass 
wholly American. As early as i860, our foreign 
population was over four millions ; the arrivals 
from i>>6o to 1890 were more than ten millions; 
and from 1890 to 1900, over three and a half mill- 
ions. In the last fiscal year, four hundred and 
fifty thousand have arrived at the port of New 
York. You know the size of the German element 
in the great cities, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, 
and others. In this city alone there are upwards 



The Old and the New Century. 25 

of forty thousand Bohemians. French-Canadians 
pour by thousands into New England and are ab- 
sorbed into its manufacturing towns. In the rail- 
way station of a large town on the Providence and 
Worcester Railroad, I observed, several years ago, 
that the public notices were posted in both French 
and English. The Italian has largely supplanted 
the Irishman in the working gangs on our sewers 
and aqueducts. I am sure that some of you re- 
member how, some time in the forties, a Chinese 
junk found its way to New York, and lay at the 
Battery, and how it was the town talk, and thou- 
sands flocked to the pier to get their first sight of a 
live Chinaman. It is a common enough sight now. 
We have, like other cities, a Chinese quarter, and 
it is not a savoury quarter, physically or morally. 
It is true that the Mongol, like the most of 
the Latin races, does not assimilate with Amer- 
ican institutions ; but others, and those the more 
vigorous races, do assimilate. They come to 
stay. They become citizens. They take a hand 
in politics, and are elected to office. They have 
their own journals in their own languages, and 
they control large and very important material in- 
terests. 

It is one thing to invite immigration. It is quite 
another and a much more serious thing to dispose 
of the results of immigration. We have, I sup- 
pose, gotten past being hoodwinked by the old 
oratorical commonplace about America being "the 



26 The Old and the New Century. 

refuge for the oppressed of every clime," with- 
out ceasing to recognise whatever modicum of 
truth may still be contained in this. While it is 
true that we are proud to number among our 
most intelligent and valuable citizens many of for- 
eign birth, it is also true that Europe has used us 
freely as a dumping-ground for the very offscour- 
ings of its populations, and has made over to us 
a horde of wretches, who, so far from being op- 
pressed, have been an oppression to their own 
governments, of which they were only too glad to 
rid their jails and workhouses. It is true enough 
that we afford protection to the emigrant, and give 
him opportunities of self-development and better 
wages than he could get at home ; also true that 
he is employed in political machinery as his spade 
and pick are employed on the railroads and aque- 
ducts ; true that we quickly furbish him into a 
government official, to administer our affairs for us 
and save us the trouble. The republican ideal is 
to make him a citizen in reasonable time and by 
wholesome and respectable methods. The reality 
is, too frequently, to make him a political tool in 
the hands of partisan demagogues. 

There is another, and, fortunately, a smaller 
class of immigrants who are not ignorant; who 
see, or think they see, in our institutions an op- 
portunity of realising their own idea of liberty, by 
which they mean unbridled license. For one, I 
frankly suspect the wisdom of the easy tolerance 



The Old and the New Century. 27 

of the American people, and its sublime and re- 
poseful confidence that its greatness and strength 
are sufficient to let this class have full liberty of 
speech and of organisation, even as an amiable ele- 
phant might tolerate a flea upon his back. It may 
be easy to dispose of a troublesome anarchist or of a 
troublesome organisation whenever they may have 
become obtrusive or dangerous ; but ideas are not 
so easily disposed of. They are more elusive, 
and they spread and multiply themselves ; and 
these people are propagandists, disseminators of 
ideas which strike not only at democracy, but at 
all government. We have already seen the 
power which such men wield, in the actual organi- 
sation of anarchistic elements for the destruction of 
life and property ; and it is a significant fact that it 
has proved possible to place an avowed anarchist 
in the gubernatorial chair of a State. 

This is not merely a question of numbers. It is 
a test question, whether the democratic idea in 
itself is centripetal, drawing to itself and identify- 
ing- with itself a mass of men trained under other 
social and political conditions ; or whether it is 
centrifugal, throwing them off from the democratic 
ideal into something else — possibly anarchism. 

For it does not follow that contact means as- 
similation and settled relation. Its first result is 
often antagonism, and sometimes the antagonism 
prows with the continuance of the contact. The 
history of the past century has shown us that. 



28 The Old and the New Century. 

An alien race was brought by compulsion within 
the sphere of American institutions, and became a 
prime factor in American politics. The working 
out of the issue thus created cost the country the 
lives of a million of producers, besides leaving a 
large section of the United States with a gigantic 
practical problem on its hands which still awaits a 
decisive solution. The country has found itself 
charged with the destinies of a race reared under 
loose and low moral ideals, enforced ignorance and 
servitude, degradation of manhood and woman- 
hood, and that race must be adjusted somehow to 
an economy of freedom and political independence. 
It is the unvarying testimony of history that the 
price of slavery is paid to the last farthing, and 
with compound interest, by the master class. The 
price is not discounted by emancipation. Emanci- 
pation may change the political status of the slave ; 
but it does not change the slave, at least for some 
generations. The emancipated slave carries into 
his free condition the antecedents, the habits, the 
spirit, the moral quality of the slave. The hatchet 
is buried, I know. Our children know nothing of 
the civil war save as they hear our stories or read 
the history in their books ; but the problem re- 
mains, and goes with us into the new century ; 
the problem whether that alien race can be fairly 
and fully incorporated into the working machinery 
of democratic institutions. " The gift of suffrage," 
perhaps some one will say. But suppose we grant 



The Old and the Neiv Century. 29 

that suffrage was wisely given when it was given, 
surely it has not solved the difficulty. Freedmen's 
bureaus, churches, schools — yes, they all have 
helped to abate the first rawness of the issue ; 
none the less, the race question is a living and 
burning question to-day over the area once occu- 
pied by the slave system, and hints have not been 
wanting" of its existence in a more northern sec- 
tion : an element of political discord, an opportu- 
nity for political trickery, a pretence for political 
injustice, a menace to the true democratic ideal, a 
living and acting survival, under the democratic 
name, of a political ideal which was essentially 
anti-democratic. 

And now we are confronted with a new set of 
questions and a new array of difficulties, through 
the events of the last three years, by which we 
have come into possession of new territory in the 
Caribbean Sea, in the Sandwich Islands, and in 
the Western Pacific, which last covers an area four 
times as large as that of Great Britain, and twice 
as large as that of Spain. Some portions of it 
have never been surveyed. It is peopled by 
Spaniards, Chinese, Malays, Negroes, Hindoos, 
and a variety of native tribes, the whole amount- 
ing to upwards of eight millions, speaking thirty 
languages or dialects, and in religion representing 
Christianity, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, and na- 
tive Paganism. This territory is ours, to organise, 
to govern, to civilise. It presents conditions such 



30 The Old and the New Century. 

as we have never before had to deal with, com- 
pelling a new and original constructive policy which 
will tax to the very utmost the resources of con- 
summate statesmanship. 

I am not here to discuss the wisdom or the error 
of the policy which has thrust this task upon us. 
Personally. I never believed in the measures which 
threw us into the recent war with Spain ; but that 
is nothing to the purpose. The war is ended ; the 
dead are buried ; the paeans have been sung ; the 
triumphal arches have been erected and are disap- 
pearing ; the processions have defiled, and we have 
Porto Rico and the Philippines added to our territory, 
and Cuba under our supervision. There is nothing 
for us but to accept the situation and to deal with it 
as wisely and efficiently as we may. I dismiss the 
word " imperialism " and all that it implies as be- 
neath notice. It is nothing but a party shibboleth 
which falsely interprets the intent of that policy 
which, justly or unjustly, it condemns. Expansion 
is a fact, whether we will or no. We are forced 
into the movement of the oreat civilisations. Iso- 
lation is no longer possible. As the wealthiest na- 
tion in the world, as the greatest consumer and 
producer in the world, we cannot be economically 
isolated. We cannot be geographically isolated 
while lines of communication by land and water are 
bringing us into contact with the very ends of the 
earth. If it be true that the centre of the world's 
commerce, wealth, and power is being shifted from 



The Old and the New Century. 31 

the Atlantic to the Pacific as once it was transferred 
from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, the open- 
ing of the Isthmus canal alone will throw us into 
the competition for the commercial supremacy of 
the Pacific ; and we cannot be politically isolated 
so long as political and commercial interests are 
so closely intertwined as they are. And if, in the 
Pacific and its adjacent territories, the question is 
to be settled whether that sea is to be commanded 
by the Slav or the Anglo-Saxon, we must have a 
voice in the settlement. We cannot be there as a 
commercial power merely, and not as a political 
and social factor. 

For one I am glad that we have been swept into 
a position which compels us to play a definite part 
in the commonwealth of nations. If we have at- 
tained to national manhood, our proper place is at 
the world's polling-booth and at the world's coun- 
cil-table. We have been called upon for arbitra- 
tion, but it is for us to take a hand also in adminis- 
tration. It is better for us. It is an indispensable 
part of our training in fields where European diplo- 
macy has grown grey, and in which we are as yet, 
comparatively, novices. If we are a great nation, 
we are to remember that greatness is not an end 
unto itself, and that the true and highest destiny 
of greatness is service. If God made us a great 
nation, it was not in order that we might comfort- 
ably grow big and rich. There belongs to us, not 
only as a right, but as a duty, a distinct and large 



32 The Old and the New Century. 

share in shaping the civilisation, the commerce, the 
intercourse of the world, so as to promote the best 
economy of life, the greatest security, and the most 
firmly established peace and concord throughout 
the world. We belong to the brotherhood of na- 
tions, and we are our brothers' keeper as they are 
ours. We have much to say about the protection 
of life and property and the laws of social morality ; 
we have much to do on the line of education in 
self-government ; we have our part in seeing to it 
that the arts and refinements of civilisation shall 
have "ample room and verge enough" for large 
growth, while their development is regulated by 
the broad principles of humanitarianism and Chris- 
tian charity. It is for us to assist in fostering the 
institutions of religion ; to further the development 
of natural forces and resources ; to aid in educating 
rude populations in personal decency and sanitary 
economy. Here is a new and practically boundless 
field, not only for statesmanship, but for philan- 
thropy, for science, for religion^ for literary culture. 
Troublesome ! Yes, I know it is ; but man is born 
unto trouble ; the chief end of man is not to be com- 
fortable ; and manhood, individual or national, is 
fostered in the atmosphere of trouble. It is in dif- 
ficult situations that great forces are needed, and a 
great nation has its greatness recognised by being 
set to cope with exceptional difficulties. If our gov- 
ernmental system does not provide for such prob- 
lems, it is for us not to give up or shirk the prob- 



The Old and the New Century. 33 

lems, but to enlarge or adjust the system. What 
signifies the conservation of a system in its origi- 
nal, snug integrity, compared with meeting the 
larger demands of the present ? God's economy, 
the range and sweep of God's plans, are greater 
than our little systems : 

'* They have their day, and cease to be. 
They are but broken lights of Thee : 
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they." 

It is a good thing that we have been lifted to a 
point where we must look at more than the United 
States, large as that is. Our fathers framed our 
polity to meet the conditions of their own day, and 
of a future as large as they could divine, and not 
to keep us shackled under conditions which they 
could by no possibility foresee. Their foresight 
was wonderful, as is shown by the fact that the 
country, with its vastly extended area, with its 
flood of immigration and its corresponding increase 
of a new class of voters, with its phenomenal 
growth of large cities and its multiplication of 
office-holders — has nevertheless held together un- 
der the old Constitution. Are we prepared to admit 
the inflexible rigidity of our polity, and the absence 
of all power of expansion or adaptation ? We have 
had no experience in colonial policy ? Then it is 
time that we set ourselves to acquire it. If we do 
not know, let us go to school. One of the best 
things that can happen to the American nation is 



34 The Old and the New Century. 

to become convinced that it does not know every- 
thing. It was said of a distinguished English pro- 
fessor that his foible was omniscience. Moreover, 
we are not having our first experience with untried 
problems. In one way or another we have been 
dealing with them from the first years of our na- 
tional life, and some of them at least we have 
solved successfully. At any rate, the experience 
has been good for us, and more is sometimes 
learned through failure than through success. We 
were a colony ourselves once, and learned by ex- 
perience the colonial policy of the mother nation, 
and were obliged to give her a lesson in return. 
A people that has no hard questions on its hands 
is in danger of stagnation. If it be true that that 
nation is happy which has no history, the truth 
places that happy nation in the category of inver- 
tebrates. Of course we shall make mistakes, and 
a good many of them ; but the triumph of life for a 
nation, as for a man, is not to make no mistakes, 
but to learn from mistakes, to mount on mistakes 
to success, and, as Frederick Robertson so finely 
said, " to organise victory out of mistakes." 

My time grows short. Yet a succession of 
questions presses forward out of the untried future, 
like lines of breakers rolling in from a near hori- 
zon. You will readily have anticipated certain 
topics which even such a desultory discussion as 
this could not well evade, but at which it is possi- 
ble only to hint. Prominent among these is the 



The Old and the Nctv Century. 35 

problem raised by the rapid and enormous increase 
of wealth, and the concentration of vast amounts of 
capital in the hands of individuals and corpora- 
tions ; the relations of labour to capital, and of great 
financial combinations to small industries. The 
near future will be forced to face these questions 
more squarely than they have yet been faced. Up 
to this time they have been met with temporary 
accommodations and compromises which have sim- 
ply staved off the radical issue, and have eluded 
the grapple with first principles. The present con- 
ditions hold possible grave elements of menace. 
Is the new century going to evolve a sharp and 
irritating class-distinction between rich and poor? 
Is capital alone to have a voice in determining the 
emoluments of labour? Is labour to be organised 
on the basis of an undiscriminating hatred of capital 
as such ? Is capital to be pitted against brains 
and culture, and is 

"The gold that gilds the straitened forehead of the fool" 

to bring the wise man abjectly to the fool's feet? 
Is capital to control political issues ? Is it going 
to be possible (or to contimie possible) for capital 
to buy up legislation in favour of any scheme which 
it may be interested in putting under the protection 
of law ? Is that really true which was said, not 
long ago, by a politician and capitalist to a learned 
and accomplished clergyman : " You have got to 
understand that we are masters of the situation. 



36 The Old and the New Century. 

We pay for the support of your churches and 
institutions, and you have got to do as we say." 
You may say, and truthfully, " that was only the 
brutal vapouring of an unscrupulous bully :" none 
the less it proves, if proof were needed, that the 
unscrupulous bully is a fact ; that that idea has 
acquired in his mind the force of a principle ; that 
he is not afraid to formulate and give voice to his 
principle, and that he represents a body of senti- 
ment larger or smaller, more or less threatening. 

It would also lie in my track to speak of the 
questions raised by the diffusion of education. In 
this lie some of our richest sources of hope, as 
there also lie possibilities of danger. From the 
beginning of our national life, popular education 
has been recognised as an integral part of the 
democratic idea. In this city the discussion of the 
common-school system was contemporaneous with 
the founding of this society, and in 1805 DeWitt 
Clinton brought the subject before the Legislature 
of the State of New York. You do not need to 
be told of the power and fruitfulness of the public- 
school system ; but your own eyes have also wit- 
nessed the attempt to convert it into a political en- 
gine, and to prostitute it to the purposes of political 
demagogues. 

The history of our higher education, as repre- 
sented by the colleges and universities, presents 
other, different, and not less interesting features. 
It is perhaps premature to speak of our system of 



The Old and the Nezv Century. 37 

hioher education. The higher education, as yet, 
is represented by individual institutions which are 
not ranged on a common line or gauged by a 
common standard. None the less, these institu- 
tions have wrought their own result, which, in the 
aggregate, is neither small nor contemptible, and 
which appears in what may fairly be called a liter- 
ary class. Our history has not evolved any great 
literary movement, any great creative literary 
epoch like the age of Pericles or the Elizabeth- 
an period. Literary habit and achievement have 
oared their way slowly and laboriously up the 
stream, against the powerful current of material 
development and preoccupation with business. 
Literary pursuit has been largely on the line of 
collecting and absorbing literary material, and we 
have collected and absorbed much. We have 
made ourselves familiar with the literary treasures 
of the world. The best and latest products of the 
European press are swept promptly into our li- 
braries and are read in their own languages. We 
have also produced something — more than could 
have been expected within the brief space of a 
century and with the predominant direction of our 
energies to material pursuits. We have produced 
no great poets, dramatists, or novelists, yet the 
average' of our best has been very high. On the 
lines of history, theology, natural science, and 
jurisprudence, we have won a high and recognised 
place. I was asked some years ago by an English 



38 The Old and the New Century. 

clergyman if the Americans read the classics. He 
evidently did not know that the standard Latin 
and English lexicon in use in the English universi- 
ties was the work of two American scholars. 

Such facts might easily be multiplied ; but the 
relation of a literary class to the constructive work 
of the future cannot be overlooked. If the literary 
class shall assert itself as a caste, if it shall shut it- 
self up in libraries and refuse contact with the peo- 
ple's life and movement which surge round the 
library walls — it may well be suspected. A self- 
centred literary aristocracy is little better than a 
moneyed or a political aristocracy, and the natural 
tendencies of high culture are as aristocratic as 
those of old families. On the other hand, there is 
power in literary taste and literary avocation, which 
often go hand in hand with the pursuit of business, 
to purge gain-getting of its sordidness, to leaven 
social intercourse and make it more distinctively 
an intercourse of minds and less of rival silks 
and diamonds. There is a distinct and grand 
and salutary possibility of power, if our men of 
ripe culture and extensive knowledge shall throw 
themselves into popular movements, infuse a better 
element into our politics, and impart to our states- 
manship a finer grain and a richer quality than, 
in many instances, now pertain to it. The real 
native ability, and the breeziness and raciness 
which mark so much of what passes under the 
name of statesmanship might, in some cases, be 



The Old and the Nezv Century. 39 

profitably toned down with a little more knowledge 
and a little more culture. The mere ability to ha- 
rangue does not constitute a statesman. Delicate 

o 

questions of arbitration and international comity 
such as are fast coming to the front are not to be 
adjusted by stump orators, and fortunately it has 
been proved that we can furnish better material. 
High culture owes a debt to the people, and it is 
to be counted one of the most hopeful signs of the 
present that so many of the presidents and pro- 
fessors of our higher literary institutions are giving 
their energies to the adjustment of international 
questions, and that, in so many of these institutions, 
the attention of students is being directed to the 
study of political and social science. 

There are two things in which one may detect 
omens of good for the new century, in spite of 
the rough seas into the teeth of which we are 
sailing. The one of these, which it is not easy 
to analyse or define, is that strange reserve 
of energy which lies in the American people. 
They are wonderfully tolerant, wonderfully long- 
suffering ; they will let gross abuses thrive and 
flaunt themselves before their very eyes, and 
will pay the cost, and only grumble a little. They 
will allow bad and designing men to have their 
swine, and ventilate their falsehoods, and assert 
their ruffianism without any vigorous or effective 
protest. This city of ours, not to go any farther, 
has sat quietly under two several regimes of fraud 



4-0 The Old and the Netv Century. 

and ruffianism ; and its citizens daily submit to cer- 
tain results of corporate greed and indifference to 
the public comfort which no great city of Europe 
would endure for a month without popular outcry 
or revolution. But this tolerance has a limit. There 
is a point where the American people as a body 
wakes up to the fact of abuse and determines to 
put an end to it. And when the sting has thus at 
last gone down to the quick of the public sense, the 
uprising is portentous, the forward movement re- 
sistless, and the catastrophe overwhelming. Your 
memories will supply more than one illustration ; 
and from hopeful signs, I am encouraged to believe 
that another and striking illustration will soon be 
added to the gallery. 

There is often apparent an indifference to prob- 
able contingencies ; a disposition to despise prophy- 
lactic measures ; a sort of unreasoning assurance 
that an emergency will create the resources to 
meet it ; and no doubt this blind confidence and 
heedlessness have sometimes entailed temporary 
loss and disaster. But one will do well to think 
twice before he sets it down solely to ignorant con- 
ceit, and refuses to allow any value or truthfulness 
to a deep-lying national instinct of real power to 
meet a crisis, which does not prove false when the 
crisis is on. If it were conceit, some of us have 
seen more than once that there was a real some- 
thing behind the conceit. And so, in the new com- 
plications into which the new century shall introduce 



The Old and the New Century. 41 

us, shall we not be warranted in a degree of faith 
that this reserve of energy and resource will come 
to the front as it shall be needed, and that the 
American people will prove its capacity to meet 
new conditions with new resources ? 

And, finally, there lies for the new century a 
source of hope in the region of religion and sound 
morals. It is to the lasting- honour of our fore- 
fathers that they distinctly recognised and ac- 
knowledged the hand of God in the evolution ol 
their national life, and the dependence of their na- 
tional prosperity upon his blessing. Puritanism 
may have made our New England fathers stern 
men, but it made them upright men. Even patri- 
otism would have been second to religion, had it 
been possible to dissociate the two. It made men 
of iron, but it was tempered iron, which could hew 
for itself a way to empire. 

" They were men of present valour, stalwart old iconoclasts, 
Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the 
past's ; " 

and though at the domestic and social altars Re- 
lio-ion stood in the ofuise of a calm Vestal, cold as 
the snows of Katahdin, never were those altars 
more sacredly guarded, or their fires fed with 
sweeter incense. 

I will not take upon myself to say that the 
religious sentiment has weakened, although it ex- 
presses itself to-day in new forms. Statistics, 



42 The Old and the New Century. 

which, in any moral question, are the unsafest of all 
guides, may nevertheless be trusted in their attest- 
ation of at least the formal adherence of a vast 
section of the nation to the institutions of religion. 
It will be an evil day for us on which the religious 
sentiment shall become weaker, and it will mean 
disaster if it do not grow stronger. An ungodly 
nation, a dissolute nation, a nation which does not 
keep faith, a selfish, grasping, and avaricious na- 
tion, however long it may thrive, and however 
brilliant its career of conquest, as surely as the sun 
goes to his setting will go over the precipice down 
which plunged the empires of the East and of 
Rome. The demand that religion should let poli- 
tics alone is an impudent demand. Religion and 
its true teachers have a legitimate and active rela- 
tion to anything in any region which involves a 
moral issue ; and that moral issues are involved in 
politics needs no argument. 

We are passing through a transition period as 
regards religious ideas and religious formulas. 
That, in itself, is not a bad thing. It is the road 
to clearer light and better definition. The great 
principles of religion are eternal, however the 
forms may change. And it is well that every 
American citizen who fears God and holds by the 
moral standards of Christianity should have his 
eyes open to one black chasm which yawns at our 
feet, in the growing menace to the sanctity of the 
marriage relation, and to the consequent integrity 



The Old and the New Century. 43 

and social influence of the family life. It is a com- 
monplace, but a commonplace which needs to be 
repeated and accentuated in these days, that the 
purity of the family life is the very foundation- 
stone of national prosperity. That this is men- 
aced, and menaced seriously by certain conditions 
of American civilisation is no anchorite's mor- 
bid fancy, and no secret to any man who can 
read the signs of the times. The looseness of the 
marriage bond, the lack of adequate legal safe- 
guards against the rash or illegal act of marriage, 
the practically unlimited facilities for divorce, and 
the increasing frequency of divorce, are things 
adapted to create the gravest concern in the mind 
of every good man and woman. The alarming 
fact is that these things are conventionally toler- 
ated, winked at, toned down and gilded, in not a 
few cases, by wealth and social position : that they 
do not call out the sturdy protest and the social 
ostracism which their essential badness and their 
dangerousness demand. 

God is in history. God is the God of nations. 
God honours and employs for high ends the na- 
tion which honours Him ; and there is hope for 
the new century only if the great principles of 
divine law underlie our legislation ; only if the 
principles of sound morals pervade politics ; only 
if the great body of citizens recognise their first 
and highest obligation to those divine ordinances 
which were from the beginning, and which must 



44 The Old and the New Century. 

abide, inflexible and unchanging, so long as kings 
reign and princes decree judgment. 

The old century is well-nigh all behind us. We 
are to be congratulated w ho have lived in this 
century, and have witnessed the growth of nations, 
the triumph of mind over matter, the evolution of 
great ideas, the discovery of nature's secrets, the 
triumphs of inventive skill, the advances in social 
and domestic comfort, the progress of learning, 
the contact of nations, the growing hatred of war, 
the inroads into barbarism, the dissemination of 
religious truth, the victory of freedom. It is 
much to have been touched by forces like these ; 
still more if we have responded sympathetically to 
the touch ; still more, if, in the smallest degree, we 
have been able to contribute to the general ad- 
vance. We may be permitted to go some short 
distance into the new century. It will not be far 
at the farthest, and the vast and imposing possi- 
bilities of that new era will unfold under the hands 
of other generations. But we can send forward to 
these our best hopes ; cheerfully make over to 
them our best achievements, in the assurance that 
they will better them and rise on them to higher 
things ; give them our best wishes and attach to 
them our best expectations for the welfare of the 
land which is ours and which we love; and hope 
with all our hearts that they may enjoy more, and 
know more, and achieve more than has fallen to 
our lot. The life of a man, of a generation, of a cen- 



The Old and the Nezv C entity y. 45 

tury, can be only fractional ; and that is a thorough- 
ly and distinctly Christian principle which schools us 
to contentment in being mere parts and stages in a 
vast development which we cannot compass, and 
in doing and giving our best to prepare for the 
men who are to come after us the blessings of 
which we cannot share the full fruition. As Chris- 
tian men, as loyal Americans, our outlook must be 
forward. 

" Freedom doth not consist 

In musing- with our faces toward the past, 
While petty cares and crawling interests twist 

Their spider threads around us, which, at last, 
Grow strong as iron chains to cramp and bind 

In formal narrowness heart, soul, and mind. 

******* 

And, as the finder of some unknown realm, 

Mounting a summit whence he thinks to see 
On either side of him the imprisoning sen. 

Beholds, above the clouds that overwhelm 
The valley-land, peak after snowy peak 

Stretch out of sight, each like a silver helm 
Beneath its plume of smoke, sublime and bleak, 

And what he thought an island, finds to be 
A continent — to him first oped — so we 

Can, from our height of Freedom, look along 
A boundless future, ours if we be strong ; 

Or, if we shrink, better remount our ships, 
And, fleeing God's express design, trace back 

The hero-freighted Mayflower's prophet-track." 






THE OLD AND THE NEW CENTURY. 

3n 2Hifcress 

DELIVERED BEFORE THE 

New York Historical Society 

ON ITS 

NINE TV-SIX TH ANNIVERSAR \ ', 

Tuesday, November 20, igoo, 

BY 

The Rev. MARVIN R. VINCENT, D.D. 




NEW YORK: 
PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY. 

1900. 



•i3.v.)i.r> 



LEMr'IO 



